Comment and Link Roundup: June 2, 2020

[brin_bellway]

Comments on my own posts:

[none suitable for this section]

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by maryellencarter) Ebook recs.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Circumventing phone-number-demanding online accounts by using VoIP numbers.

[mild cw: amnesia] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by xenosagaepisodeone, though my post is more *inspired* by hers than actually responding to her) Tech-literacy and (supposed) digital natives.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by nudityandnerdery) Fuck cloud dependence; also, tips on harm-reduction DIY smart TVs.

[cw: poison] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by outofcontextdnd) A D&D item that on first glance looks useless, on second glance looks helpful, and on third glance looks dangerous.

[cw: food, dieting] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by rustingbridges) Optimising your diet for nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get enough of. [four comments]

---

Links:

Laugh rule:
[cw: hacking] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by feotakahari) A rather meta scamming attempt.



There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.


Comments on my own posts:

*long sigh*

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: (arguably) nsfw text, poison, discourse] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by danksy-lives) A ha-ha-but-actually argument about whether it should be legal to have sex in public, in which *both* sides treat "decency" as an invalid reason to be against it. [two comments]

(Our actual views:

OP, on being pro-legalisation: "when I first wrot this it was a joke, but ive come to believe i unironically"

Me, on outlawing talking in public: partly a joke, partly...you know that thing where sometimes people pretend to be more radical than they really are, in the hopes that their opponent will "compromise" on the position they actually wanted all along? That.

Me, on refusing to take decency into account: unlike many participants in the exhibitionism discourse, I actually *do* have an intuition that public indecency is wrong. But my intuitive definition of sex is significantly broader than most people's, and I know of many other people with many other intuitive definitions. Once you start allowing decency to be taken into consideration, there seems to be no principled line to draw for *whose* senses of decency are accommodated: it devolves into a fight for dominance (so to speak). I already know I'm going to lose that fight, so I'm not going to bother starting it. Drawing the public-sex line at "biohazards" has the advantage of its own separate set of justifications, with the happy side effect of covering *most* indecent acts by *most* people's standards. You may have to scurry past some public grinding, but we paraphiles have had to scurry past people being publicly indecent since time immemorial, and while it is unpleasant I promise it *is* tolerable.)

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) The ways in which grocery shopping has changed. (I recommend the whole thread: it's interesting to see how different people's grocery habits are.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) Navigating quarantine laws while having a tendency to manifest disease-like symptoms for non-contagious reasons.

---

Links:

[World Health Organization; Wayback] (doesn't seem to have a byline; h/t Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations newsletter) Life is not one damn thing after another, the damn things overlap: the Congo is dealing with another Ebola outbreak on top of the COVID-19 plague. It seems to be settling down now. Maybe.

[Al Jazeera; Wayback] (doesn't seem to have a byline, just "source: Reuters News Agency"; h/t CEPI newsletter) Elsewhere in overlapping plagues: widespread dengue in Latin America. (FTR, my official stance on bat eradication is "talk to me again after we've eradicated mosquitoes".)

[WhichCar; Wayback] (by Cameron Kirby) A silver lining(?) of fewer people out on the roads: several new speed records have been set for the "Cannonball Run", in which one drives across the width of the continental United States. "While he has not disclosed the exact time, [...] the drivers would have had to achieve an average speed of *at least* 173km/h for the 4507km journey", and yes, that is exactly as illegal as it sounds.